Frames from Fiction: Hunters

This week’s fiction piece, “Boys Town,” by Jim Shepard, opens with a photograph by Erika Larsen. The image is from her series “The Hunt,” which documents hunting in the U.S. and Canada. “My attraction stemmed from the sense of calm that I believed surrounded the hunters,” Larsen told me. The lone figure receding into the icy depths of the forest perfectly matches Shepard’s story, but his descriptions of the woods, survival, ammo, and traps had me thinking of other hunting imagery as well. Here’s a selection.

“I’ve been photographing hunting for over ten years—everything from the bowhead whale hunt in Alaska to the moose, deer, and bear hunts in Maine to the deer hunt in Texas,” Lee told me. “Most of the hunters I photograph are sincere in their efforts to eat what they kill. I am adamantly not anti-hunting, but I find it curious that even though contemporary civilization has made hunting obsolete, people still have the need to do it. Why?”

Courtesy INSTITUTE and Pace/MacGill.

Top image: “Trapping,” by Erika Larsen, 2005.

Jessie Wender, formerly a photo editor at The New Yorker, is a senior photo editor at National Geographic.